“Creates a universe of thought that seems at once bounded and infinite.”
—Merve Emre, New York Review of Books
“Brilliant, weird, and profound, telling truths about the modern condition that most novelists today have forgotten, or never knew.”
—Adam Kirsch, Tablet
“A delightful perversion of history.”
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“Sublime…Sachs’s talent is on full display in this brilliant work of visionary absurdism.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“An absolutely wild ride . . . This is a book with real humanity to its humorousness, in which comedy is taken with the utmost seriousness, and not just played for laughs.”
—The Believer (Finalist for the 2019 Believer Book Award)
“Sachs confidently fictionalizes history, infusing the process of scientific discovery with dark absurdity.”
—New Yorker
“Beguiling and utterly magical…A transportive work of art.”
—Poornima Apte, Booklist (starred review)
“This impressive debut is for fans of George Saunders and Vladimir Nabokov…Deep philosophy is applied to nearly everything that pops up, including the eating of soup.”
—Stephen Schmidt, Library Journal (starred review)
“At once a pitch-perfect send-up of an overwrought philosophical tract and a philosophical tract in its own right — meaty, hilarious, and a brilliant examination of intangible and utterly human mysteries.”
—Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed, Best Books of 2019
“Magnificently refined sense of absurdity…masterful sublation of guilt, anxiety, and embarrassment into perfectly compressed tales . . .immense humor.”
—Ben Roth, AGNI
“Cerebral and brilliant, and some of the freshest-feeling literature I’ve read in some time.”
—Emily Temple, Literary Hub (and a Favorite Book of 2019)
“The second dazzling book by Adam Ehrlich Sachs, a teutonically involuted, toweringly philosophical novel that is by some weird alchemy more fun for being teutonically involuted and toweringly philosophical.”
—Daniel Levin Becker, The Millions
“One of my favorite debuts of the year . . . Hysterical and innovative.”
—Mark Haber, Houston Chronicle, Favorite Books of 2019
“Extremely—perhaps even deafeningly—good . . . The muscular delicacy of [Sachs’s] achievement—with its subtle and complex treatment of familial love, familial hostility, familial pain, both shared and unknowingly-shared—cannot be overstated."
—Nathan Knapp, Music & Literature
“Has Sachs written ‘the best of all possible books,’ as Leibniz himself might call it? In a literary landscape crying out for wit and intricacy, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been better.”
—Leigh Anne Focareta, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Mix Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, add dashes of Liu Cixin and Isaac Asimov, and you’ll approach this lively novel of early science…Impeccably written. A pleasure to read.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“It is quite wonderful to contemplate The Organs of Sense as the tragicomic illustration of Leibniz’s universe of self-contained monads between which no communication is possible.”
—Arthur Willemse, World Literature Today
“Sachs has written a misdirecting novel about the pleasures and perils of misdirection, and the contraption works exquisitely, proving that it is impossible to be a person on whom nothing is lost.”
—Henri Lipton, Zyzzyva
"This book is only for people who like joy, absurdity, passion, genius, dry wit, youthful folly, amusing historical arcana, or telescopes."
—Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors and American Innovations
"A madcap, ingenious fable which booms with endless jokes and riffs about the nature of consciousness, The Organs of Sense is yet another dazzling, high-wire performance from our modern-day Kleist, Adam Ehrlich Sachs."
—Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs
"This is the funniest and most original novel I've read in a very long time, a madcap blend of philosophical malpractice and byzantine palace intrigue. It's like what might happen if Helen DeWitt attempted a revisionist seventeenth-century historical novel, or if W. G. Sebald had gone insane. In other words, there's nothing else like it. Read it and see!"
—Andrew Martin, author of Early Work
"At once erudite and comic, The Organs of Sense is an absurd and beautifully finessed pseudo-historical novel which deftly circles around a dark core."
—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World and A Collapse of Horses
"Adam Ehrlich Sachs is one of the most intelligent writers in America, and one of the funniest. His fiction is both deeply cerebral and deeply human—and deeply human because it’s deeply cerebral. Inherited Disorders has proven to be one of the most lasting literary pleasures of the decade for me, and The Organs of Sense is every bit as sharp and surprising. The bottom line is this: over the last few years, his work has offered me the zing of true and exhilarating literary exploration in a way that few other books have done."
—Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip and The Illumination